The Schwartz Report

Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and AWS To Gain Data Recovery Options

When data protection provider Veeam last week held its annual gathering of customers and partners, the company outlined how the next release of its availability suite will offer near-real-time recovery, provide integration with a much wider range of storage hardware and use Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for disaster recovery services. Veeam also said it will provide extended support for Office 365.

As reported last week, Veeam Availability Suite v10 will offer continuous data protection (CDP) with recovery point objectives of 15 minutes. Co-CEO Peter McKay, speaking during the opening keynote of the company's VeeamOn conference in New Orleans, described v10 as a "major extension" of its platform, which will widen its ability to backup and recover physical systems, which still account for an estimated 25 percent of datacenter resources, as well as Linux and Windows endpoints, covering PCs, personal mobile devices and IoT-based hardware with embedded software. A new API will allow connectivity to substantially more NAS storage offerings and reduced long-term retention costs with support for native object storage. But the other key focus at last week's conference was the rapid growth of cloud infrastructure, both hybrid and public services.

"Seven percent of the company's customers already have a cloud-first strategy when it comes to IT," said Paul Mattes, vice president of Veeam's global cloud group, according to a recent survey. Mattes, who gave a keynote in the second day of the conference, cited IDC's projection that 46 percent of IT spending will be in the cloud. "This is happening at a pace much greater than anything we've seen before in the history of IT," said Mattes, who joined Veeam last fall after a long tenure with Microsoft and its Azure team. "The cloud is being adopted at a rate that's much faster than anything we've seen, and that's because of the business opportunity and agility that cloud technology has afforded. So Veeam has embraced this aggressively [and] we are going to continue to deliver solutions that are cloud focused."

Several years after releasing its Cloud Connect interface, supporting Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as a target, the v10 release will bring the CDP technology to create much deeper integration with the two companies' large public clouds, among others. While Veeam gave many of its key alliance partners ample airtime during the three-day gathering, including Microsoft, VMware, Cisco, NetApp, IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the company emphasized the deeper relationship it has formed with Microsoft. "Our Microsoft partnership has been one of the strongest and deepest partnerships over the years and we are going to take that further and deeper," CEO McKay said.

As part of last week's new pact, Veeam and Microsoft said they are working together to offer Veeam Disaster Recovery in Microsoft Azure, which will provide automated availability of business-critical workloads by providing DR as a service in Azure. The new Veeam DR in Azure will tie Veeam's new Direct Restore tool and the new Veeam Powered Network (PN), a tool that the company said will automate the setup of DR sites in Azure. "What the Veeam Powered Network is about is delivering a free lightweight tool that you can use to quickly set up a DR site in Azure using an easy-to-configure, software-defined networking tool," Mattes said. It doesn't require a VPN and will be offered to organizations of all sizes.

Also coming is native support for Microsoft's Azure BLOB cloud object service. Called Veeam's Scale Out Backup Repository (SOBR), the company said it will treat cloud object storage as an archive tier, allowing customers to retain Veeam backups as BLOB storage, a lower cost option for retaining data. The Veeam Management Pack will also tie with Microsoft's new Operations Management Service (OMS), a Web-based services that provides views of system and multi-cloud resources.

Veeam also said it is upgrading its recently launched Veeam Backup for Office 365. The protection tool will provide extended support for Exchange Online and will bring SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business into the mix, providing support for hybrid SharePoint environments. The new release will provide multi-tenancy and support for multiple repositories, which will allow its network of 15,000 cloud service providers to deliver more secure, scalable and broader options. It will also include added automation with new PowerShell SDK and a RESTful API. "We will deliver full PowerShell support for creating jobs and modifying your organizations and adding infrastructure components to fully automating the recovery of e-mail items," said Mike Resseler, director of product management, who demonstrated the new Office 365 features. Reseller noted that the new RESTful API will interface with existing automation tools.

In addition to Microsoft Azure, Veeam said it has invested in a company that will allow it to provide native and agentless protection of AWS EC2 instances, and some of its other offerings including Aurora, Redshift and RDS. The company inked a partnership with N2WS, which will offer what it claims is the industry's first cloud-native, agentless backup and recovery and DR software that can recover AWS applications, moving them to other AWS accounts or regions, as well as into hybrid multicloud environments. During a session after the keynote Rick Vanover, Veeam's director of product marketing, demonstrated what he described as a mock scenario (sine it's not available yet) where data backed up in AWS was moved over to Azure (but, as Vanover noted, through non-existent components). "I showed the functionality that the Connector will have," he noted in a follow-up e-mail. "It will pick up AWS snapshots and write in a repository of Veeam."

Microsoft is planning to activate "Insights for MyAnalytics" sometime late this month for most Office 365 users, but the ability of organizations to manage this feature won't be available until possibly mid-May.